September 25, 2017

When it comes to biographies, Walter Isaacson has the Midas touch. He's written about Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Einstein, to name a few--and soon he'll be publishing a biography of Leonardo da Vinci. At this point in his career, every book Isaacson writes becomes part of the greater conversation--but we thought it might be interesting to know what he's been reading when he's not writing.

Below you'll find a list of nonfiction that shows a lot of breadth and even highlights his New Orleans roots.

Both books explore race, sex, and music in the New Orleans red-light district known as Storyville that was a cradle of jazz a century ago. I'm going to be teaching the writing of history at Tulane next year, and I want to show how an academic historian and a popular writer approach the same fascinating topic from different angles.

Speaking of New Orleans, these delightful books are memoirs combined with recipes, which is a tasty combination, the former by the proprietor of Commander's Palace and the latter by a great social commentator masquerading as a cooking writer.

The CEO of Microsoft describes his childhood as an immigrant, his rise as an executive, the lessons of leadership he has learned, and his vision for how the next wave of technology will affect society. All four strands make this a riveting book.

The world chess champion who was beaten by a machine twenty years ago reflects on the limits of artificial intelligence and how human creativity can prevail. I found it both convincing and encouraging.

September 21, 2017

Within a few pages, readers will be mesmerized by Good Me Bad Me and by Milly, a teen placed temporarily with a foster family as she prepares to testify against her mother, who kidnapped and killed small children over several years. But the foster family, which seems so perfect from the outside, is riddled with secrets. And it soon becomes clear that Milly herself has been damaged deeply by her mother.

The Amazon editors picked Good Me Bad Me as a best book of the month and made it our Featured Debut of September.

We spoke to Ali Land by email about the pressures teens face and how she built Milly's memorable character.

Amazon Book Review: This is your first novel. How long has this book idea been bubbling in the back of your brain?

Ali Land: Not so much the book idea"”that happened about three years ago"”but the conversation that led me to put pen to paper was about nine years ago. Prior to becoming a writer I spent a decade as a Child and Adolescent mental health nurse. During that time I looked after a fifteen-year-old girl who believed her insides were a different color, and no matter what she did, she would turn into her mother who had been involved in the serious harm of young children. I carried the burden this young person, and others, felt, around with me for years, and it left me feeling haunted. When I couldn't hold it in any longer, the first draft of Good Me Bad Me tore out of me in five, sleepless months.

Milly, your fifteen-year-old narrator, struggles with how much of herself she should reveal to her new foster family, especially as some members don't seem to really want to get to know her. Is this tension between concealing and revealing the true self something you've see often in teens?

Absolutely, yes. Secret keeping amongst teens is, in the most part, very normal. It's how a sense of self is developed and their identity is carved out. As a mental health nurse I used to run various therapy groups for children in treatment. We encouraged them to ask themselves questions like: who's keeping the secret, what is the secret, and why are they keeping it. The advice we gave to their parents was to ask the same questions. Teenagers want, more than anything, to fit in, to be included, to find peers that they can share interests with. The concealing and revealing is like a dance that happens between them, a bond, but one that can be severed if too much or too little is revealed or withheld. Adolescence is a particularly turbulent time in life, and the secrets that Milly has, and the pressure she is under to keep them, create, at times, an excruciating tension for her, which is something I felt important for the reader to experience.

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Do you think it's possible for us to ever show our true selves"”even to ourselves?

Yes, I do believe it is, certainly not to everybody but those that love us unconditionally, yes. And in regards to self, I think it's often less about deliberately trying to hide parts of ourselves, more that we don't necessarily know ourselves well enough. Life is busier than ever and full of distractions. Simply by logging onto our laptop we're one click away from the rest of the world. The choice that comes with that can confuse a person. Who am I? Who do I want to be? Who should I be? I recently read a line of poetry by Atticus"”"She wore a thousand faces, all to hide her own" "”which immediately made me think of Milly. The majority of people would never understand that although Milly handed her mother into the police, she misses her, the Peter Pan killer, the monster who is splashed across the front of every newspaper. In cases like Milly, sadly, she'll never be able to show her true self, but by writing about children like Milly I'm hopeful a different level of understanding will be reached, and following that, compassion. I very much view my writing as an extension of my nursing and it's a privilege to be able to share, and discuss, the book with readers from all over the world.

Milly's school puts on a play based on Lord of the Flies, and you've cited that book as one of your inspirations. What do you find so personally compelling about Lord of the Flies?

I was fifteen when I read Lord of the Flies and it had a profound effect on me. I found myself asking the questions: What would I or any of my classmates do if we were marooned on an island? What would I be capable of? What would you? Not only did it make me think about the potential of children and what actions they might take in order to survive extraordinary circumstances, it also made me think about forgiveness. Can people forgive children who do dreadful things in order to survive? Reading Lord of the Flies as a child gave me permission as an adult to explore, within the safe space of fiction, how people feel about children who are different in some way.

Milly wants to give her "good me" supremacy over her thoughts and her actions, but ongoing bullying at school undermines her intentions. The use of social media and mobile phones to further the bullying is especially infuriating. Do you think kids are bullied more now than previous generations were?

I think the way in which bullying happens has changed. It's less about fisticuffs or name calling in the playground but now a sophisticated and sustained onslaught using phones and the internet. The hurt moves at a much faster pace with a must vaster reach, therefore the damage to the individual is greater. Social media and the online savviness of young people creates opportunities for the bullying to remain hidden for longer"”no ripped school shirt or black eye to alert the adults to what is happening. This is highlighted in the book when the online forum the head mistress gives the girls as a private space becomes an arena for bullying and hounding Milly, with her foster sister, Phoebe, changing the password frequently and always remaining one step ahead of the adults. It's a terrifying thought that once an image is posted on the internet it can potentially remain there forever, and it's devastating to hear of teenagers who no longer want to live because of bullying, the term bullycide now sadly part of our vocabulary. It goes back to the questions I mentioned earlier, the who's, the what's and the why's. It's not possible to monitor every facet of a child's life, but the adults surrounding them do need to be asking the right questions, and tuning into any behavior changes that might suggest the child is being bullied.

I expect that some people are going to love the ending and others will be more ambivalent. When you started writing Good Me, Bad Me, did you know how it would end? [no spoilers!]

No, I didn't. I'm what's termed a "pantser," the opposite of a plotter. I write to explore, to go as deep as possible into my main character's psyche and see what lurks there. It was an experiment placing Milly in a foster family that look perfect on paper, but behind closed doors are anything but, yet, even in this acutely dysfunctional family, an opportunity of a new life for Milly exists, and as readers will find out towards the end of the book, a carrot is dangled. Does she go for it? And if she does, can she be blamed? Milly is only sixteen when the book ends. Has she achieved her shiny, new life? Only time will tell.

So what does he do for an encore? A book about cats, naturally. As it turns out, it's not a such a radical detour. Distillery Cats collects "biographies" of some of the more memorable felines encountered across Brad's many travels: 30 of the best mousers working distilleries, breweries, bars, and wineries, including hand-drawn portraits and stat sheets touting each cat's "super-power" and number of kills. (These cats mean business.)

Here Brad presents the inspiration behind the book and a few of its furry-yet-fierce principals. One is named Fletcher Pickles.

A Note from Brad Thomas Parsons, Author of Distillery Cats

Two years ago I was at a book launch party hosted at a popular Brooklyn distillery when the guest of honor--an esteemed, award-winning cocktail historian--pulled me aside and asked, with a mix of concern and bemusement, "Is it true you're writing a book about cats?"

I'll be the first to admit that my upcoming book, Distillery Cats: Profiles in Courage of the World's Most Spirited Mousers, is a bit of a departure from my last two books. But as a lifelong "cat guy" this topic double-downed on two of my passions, and any way you break down the formula, the solution to the equation for "Cats + Booze = x" is a win-win situation. Think of it as a passionate, side project--an experimental EP to the Bitters and Amaro LPs.

There's a storied tradition of employing felines in the workforce in roles such as ship cats, barn cats, bookstore cats, pub cats, and bodega cats. And when the expensive grains on hand at distilleries and breweries are like a 24-hour Sizzler to mice and other pests, enter the distillery cat. With the craft-distilling boom, the American distillery cat has evolved from old-world pest control to modern-age social media darling (many with their own dedicated accounts with more followers than the actual distillery) and unofficial brand ambassadors. Taking a selfie with the resident distillery cat is as much a part of visiting a distillery as sampling the booze.

I "interviewed" over 30 cats for the book, and the origin stories and misadventures of Hoodie, Fletcher Pickles, General Patton, Char, Daryl Hall, Scratchy, and so many more still bring a smile to my face. And Julia Kuo's illustrations capture these spirited mousers in all their glory.

I hope you have as much fun reading the book as I did writing it. I encourage you to keep up with all the boozy cat action on Instagram.

Keep calm and purr on....

--Brad Thomas Parsons

BOONE

Thomas & Sons Distillery | Portland, Oregon

"We got him off of Craigslist on a whim. Best. Decision. Ever," says Thomas & Sons Distillery Operations Manager Ray Nagler on the origin story of their beloved distillery cat, a Maine coon named Boone. Boone is strictly a nine-to- fiver, commuting to and from the distillery with Nagler, but he's had the travel bug since he was a kitten, when Nagler would carry him around, swaddled in a scarf, to the local farmers' markets, parties, and bars. "He's getting a little too enormous for the scarf. When he was a kitten, I used to take him to an irresponsible amount of dive bars, sometimes covertly." When Boone had too much excitement for the evening, he would go limp and Nagler would drape the sleeping cat over the back of her neck, occasionally passing him around the bar for other patrons to do the same with. "Only one time did we ever get kicked out. It's amazing what bar managers will let you get away with when you've got a kitty in tow."

Nagler recommends other distilleries in the market for a cat look for one that's friendly and "not too spookable," though she's quick to point out that Boone, who is yet to dispatch an unwanted pest, is pretty useless in the security department. "He's lucky he's gorgeous. Have you ever had a friend with no particular skill but was a pleasure to have around? Boone's that guy. Honestly, he's an oaf with zero ability to take care of himself and we love him for it." But in the "people person" department, Boone would get "exceeds expectations" on his annual performance review. His extroverted personality makes him a hit with kids and a sponge for affection. "If he's left in a room without humans, he just waits by the door."

COOPER

Corsair Distillery | Nashville , Tennessee

Devoted fans of Corsair's popular distillery cat Pizza (see page 82) have no fear! Copper, the new cat in town, isn't a replacement but has instead taken up residency at another Corsair facility in Nashville. Copper was found as a street cat. He didn't play nice with the other cats at the adoption facility but was just what Corsair Distillery was looking for. His name was crowd-sourced on Facebook and seemed fitting given his beautiful, shiny coat of fur. Corsair Distillery owner and distiller Darek Bell quickly discovered his new hire's special prowess as an expert mouser before Copper even officially started the job. After the adoption, Bell took Copper to his farmhouse for an adjustment period before punching in at the distillery, but it didn't take the cat long to discover the malt house on the property. "Copper caught a mouse and jumped on the bed where I was working with my laptop and released it right next to me. I nearly leaped out of bed in shock."

Copper's main role at the distillery is pest control, but he's a natural at tourism and hospitality. "He loves visitors and enjoys being a part of the tours, except when he gets in a pissy mood. He is very affectionate when not being a complete brat. Basically, he has the standard cat operating system." Copper also has a knack for being an in-house morale booster for the team. "Bottling is a tough job, as it is so repetitive and monotonous. Copper loves to come out on bottle day, and I think he does it to lift people's spirits, even though they are sweating buckets and he is just sitting there lazing about."

DARYL HALL

Lucky Hare Brewing Company | Hector, New York

Ian Conboy, vice president and head brewer at Lucky Hare Brewing Company, cut a deal with a local architecture firm. "If I brought beer up to their drinking club and gave a little presentation about the brewery, one of the architects would exchange two barn cats for my time. It was a hell of a deal." As a longtime fan of the sweet Philly soul sounds of Hall and Oates, Conboy naturally dubbed the two feline brothers Daryl Hall and John Oates. Sadly, John Oates is no longer with us (RIP), but his brother Daryl has lived up to his potential and honors John Oates's memory each and every day on the job. "Hopefully this guy stays around for a long time because he has a great demeanor and is a terror to all mice in the brewery." For now, Daryl is a strictly catch-and- release mouser, but he did once claim an unfortunate barn swallow for his trophy case.

Daryl resides in the brewery most of the week. "He pretty much runs around like a lunatic searching for bugs and mice. Daryl then naps for most of the day behind the buckets where I keep all of my sanitary fittings." But on weekends, it's all about mixing and mingling with visitors in the busy taproom. His primary role may be pest patrol, but he's pretty good at keeping patrons around to order another beer.

"We were hoping to have a cat who would hunt for parts of the day but also be chill in the brewery. Daryl has exceeded those expectations and has become a super-friendly bar cat too. Plus, the ladies fall in love with him at first sight."

FLETCHER PICKLES

Hotel Tango Artisan Distillery | Indianapolis , Indiana

While there's a lot of "don't ask, don't tell" when it comes to the legalities of having a distillery cat on premises, Fletcher Pickles is free and clear as he's registered as an Emotional Service Animal for Travis Barnes, one of the distillery's owners who is a combat-disabled veteran. Barnes was doing research on distillery traditions, and the historic role of cats and distilleries was one of his favorite topics. After the research, he and co-owner Brian Willsey picked up an eight-week-old kitten. Willsey admits, "We paid a lot of money for Fletcher, much to the chagrin of our investors. However, because he is used as a piece of equipment to keep the grains safe from mice, Fletcher is a tax write-off. He paid for himself pretty quickly, based on the number of calls we get a week asking if he is on duty before a party comes to the distillery."

Named after Indianapolis's historic Fletcher Place neighborhood, home of the distillery, Fletcher lives at the distillery with occasional sleep-away-camp visits to Willsey's home. Early on, he hunted down fifteen mice, but after the first few months, the mice knew they had met their match and left for good. One of his most famous incidents came about after "he got all messed up on some really powerful Colombian-grade catnip" and got twisted in a nest of flypaper strips. Panicked, he ran to his litter box and rolled around, covering himself with kitty litter. For the next month, following a trip to the vet, who had to cut off the clumps of kitty-litter-covered hair, Fletcher resembled a cat who had "escaped a near-death experience with a wood chipper."

He quickly developed a devoted fan base and stepped into his role as the Hotel Tango mascot, with nearly as many Instagram followers as the actual distillery. "I suspect he sees himself as the Brad Pitt of cats. Women love him, knowing that he will eventually hurt them. However, they can't help themselves because he is so goddamn handsome."

SCRATCHY

Industry City Distillery | Brooklyn, New York

Arcane Distilling | Brooklyn, New York

Scratchy does double-duty as distillery cat at two businesses that share the same space: Industry City Distillery and Arcane Distilling. As David Kyrejko, who works at both venues (engineer at ICD, distiller at Arcane) and spends a lot of time with "the Scratch" will tell you, "two distilleries sharing 12,000 square feet makes for lots of hiding spots."

Scratchy began her life as the "esteemed mouser" at the Spotted Pig in the West Village. Chef April Bloomfield dubbed her Scratchins Black (a nod to the British slang for table scraps), but everyone knows her as Scratchy. When Scratchy's previous owner, restaurateur Ken Friedman, could no longer keep the cat and put it out there that she needed a home, Kyrejko was sold. "I wanted a social cat that wasn't too 'mushy.' Scratch has some lap-cat tendencies but also has the feisty hunter streak. Given her vast experience in food service, I thought she'd fit in just fine."

As the two distilleries share a floor in the same building, Scratchy tends to wear a lot of different hats in the operation, from head distiller to chief marketing officer to shop foreman to lab cat. "She's basically the entire marketing department for Industry City Distillery and is my late-night lab helper over at Arcane." On weekends, she's devoted to full-time customer relations, when, as the de facto face of Industry City Distillery, her primary job is to hang around the tasting room to greet visitors. "Scratchy is unusually social. She comes when called and actually loves crowds. She spends most of her time lounging on one of the tasting room tables and will also just sort of hang with patrons. They love it. It's amazing what having a cat can do when someone is waiting in line for a cocktail."

Books by Brad Thomas Parsons

Distillery Cats: Profiles in Courage of the World's Most Spirited Mousers

Amar The Spirited World of Bittersweet, Herbal Liqueurs, with Cocktails, Recipes, and Formulas

Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, with Cocktails, Recipes, and Formulas

August 30, 2017

It probably should not be surprising that the authors of the best-selling Dream Home and hosts of multiple shows on HGTV bought their first home when they were eighteen. Or that they started their first business at the age of seven. But what about their upbringing made them this way? And what were the other mileposts along the way? In It Takes Tw Our Story, Jonathan and Drew Scott discuss how their family and upbringing have led to their success in life. And they do it together, which means you'll get the full story told in their own unique voice.

Here's an early taste of the book, in their own words -

Why did you decide to write a memoir?

Drew: What may seem to some to be an overnight success - is more accurately about 32 years in the making. It all started with our first entrepreneurial venture at age seven. We SHOULD be 90 years old if you look at the amount of stuff we've done.

Jonathan: We felt the only way for people to truly understand what makes us the men we are today...would be to experience all those memories from our past. Some are funny, some are sad, but all of them are honest and completely unedited.

Any revelations you learned about your brother you never knew?

Drew: Hahaha, no. We know ALL the stories about each other. What we did discover, though, is that in several instances we had different recollections of the same event. We had to research with friends to verify WHO was right.

What will readers enjoy about the book?

Drew: Readers will enjoy a raw look into our lives - the ups, the downs, we didn't hold anything back. Most of the content in the book, we've never publicly talked about before.

Was there a part that was difficult to write - Anything in particular you found hard to share?

Jonathan: I've never publicly spoken about my divorce before. It was the most painful experience in my life and I experienced a deep period of depression. On camera, when Property Brothers launched, I had to be happy and engaged, however when the cameras cut I was dealing without a lot of pain.

The two of you have a lot of wide-ranging interests: acting, magic, basketball, karate, computers, real estate. How did you become so multi-faceted? How do you make time for your many hobbies?

Drews: We are admittedly overachievers and proud of it. Ever since an early age, our parents encouraged us to follow our passions. They had one rule though: they didn't care WHAT we were going to do for a hobby or a job...we just had to do SOMETHING. We were not allowed to simply sit around and play video games. So we stayed active, constantly tried new things, and unknowingly became pretty diverse in our skill set.

Your family is clearly important to you, and you share a lot of qualities with your parents"”namely, an impressive work ethic and a love of nature. What's the most important thing your parents instilled in you as children?

Jonathan: There's simply no way to quantify the amount of advice mom and dad have given us over the years "“ all of it has proven to be life altering. The two nuggets that stand out would be "if somebody tells you that something can't be done, find five ways to do it and prove them wrong." Also, you don't need a million dollars to make a difference in the world. "Every single person on this planet can affect change."

Amazon Book Review: Home Fire is a title with several possible meanings. Could you talk a little about its significance to your novel?

Kamila Shamsie: It's a novel about very close and intimate relationships but also about great destructiveness within families, and in the world. I wanted the title to convey both the warmth by invoking 'keep the home fires burning' and the conflagration via the image of a house on fire.

Early in the novel, you describe a moment when Isma, the young scholar who has recently moved to Northampton, MA, hears, from within her apartment, a mysterious music "impossible to pinpoint as any known instrument, voice or birdcall." When she runs outside to see the icicles that are its source, she is felled by sudden pain: "Pain swerved at her them, physical, bringing her to her knees." It's unclear whether she is in emotional pain"”missing her brother "“ or physical pain. Can you tell us a little about that ambiguous moment?

Emotional pain often manifests itself in a physical way, doesn't it? That's what's going on here. It's a significant moment because she's so angry at her brother for certain choices he's made that she's tried to will herself into not allowing herself to feel emotional pain about it. But the strange music she hears reminds her of him and it makes the pain she's been holding at bay swerve towards her unexpectedly and too quickly for her to try and block it.

There is plenty of humor in your book, whether it is your characters' references to "GWM" "“ Googling While Muslim (always risky), or "ecosystem beards" "“ beards large enough to contain an ecosystem. But in general, the political tone of the current era seems far removed from the 1970s, when "Lone Wolf," the secularized Muslim who becomes Home Secretary in "Home Fire" attends rallies where he sees slogans like "Nazis are no fun" and "Racists are bad in bed." Is there humor in the current political debate, or are we in a different spot? Can novelists like you make an impact on the tone?

f you've grown up in Pakistan you know there's no such thing as a political spot in which humor can't play a role. Satire is a powerful tool to use against those who want above all to be taken seriously. Humor is also an important human defense against bleakness. I think the mistake people sometimes make is in thinking that humor is synonymous with lightness or flippancy or frivolity. It isn't. Humor can be very, very angry.

Home Fire begins when Isma is detained and interrogated by airport security on her way to study in the United States, and the difficulties Muslims have entering or reentering the US and Britain is central to the plot. You yourself were raised in Karachi, attended college in the United States, and now live in London. Did you have to make a choice between those possible homes, or was that choice made for you by circumstance? Would you choose otherwise if you could?

After grad school, I was fairly nomadic for about a decade. Karachi was my primary base and, significantly, where I did most of my writing - but I would spend a few months every year in London and had a recurring position as a visiting professor at Hamilton College in upstate New York. For a while, that was the life I wanted. But at a certain point I wanted to stop and have a home in which I could unpack my books and put a painting or two in the walls. Somewhere in the course of the decade London had become the place I most wanted to stay in. I wouldn't say I had to make a choice - I did make a choice, and it's one I've never regretted.

In Home Fire, Lone Wolf argues that citizenship is a privilege, not a right "“ and can therefore be revoked. Where do you stand on that?

It's dangerous nonsense, and sadly it isn't only fictional politicians who say it. Citizenship is a right. It's a legal status. The point of having a system of justice in a country is that you have people stand trial for crimes they've committed and sentence them if they're found guilty. But to decide that certain people should simply be thrown out of the country or forbidden from returning goes against the very idea of a system of justice. Also, why should other countries be expected to take in people who've committed such damning crimes?

What do you think it is about Pakistan that had led to such success among its writers in English recently? I'm thinking of you, of Mohsin Hamid, of Nadeem Aslam.

Well, nothing has happened overnight. Nadeem published his first novel 25 years ago, Mohsin and I almost twenty years ago. It was only about 6 or 7 years ago that people started to talk about a 'boom' in Pakistani writing - and the conversation around that in the US and UK was generally about the writers you've mentioned as well as Mohammed Hanif ]and Daniyal Mueenuddin[https://www.amazon.com/Other-Rooms-Wonders/dp/0393337200]. There were then and are now other fine writers being published, but none have received the same kind of attention outside the subcontinent. So actually my feeling is one of disappointment that, several years later, there aren't other writers whose names are also on that list.

Having said all that - if you're from Pakistan you understand how closely connected the political and the personal are, and very often that comes through in the writing. I think this is a moment in history when American readers want that. So right now, I don't think there's something about Pakistan that is leading to such attention being given to Pakistani writers - there's something about America.

Home Fire, like Nadeem Aslam's The Golden Legend and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, allows the reader room for a moment, or a fantasy, of what you might call a happy ending. Tell us a little about that: do you feel that moment of happiness is necessary to the experience of the reader, or is it expressing some essential truth about your characters' experience? Is it just too discouraging for everyone if you show full-on destruction?

I can't comment on what either Mohsin or Nadeem were doing in their novels but I can tell you that I wasn't thinking about what my readers wanted or needed when I wrote my ending - I was only thinking of what seemed right for the novel. I wrote the last sentence, thinking there might be other sentences that followed and then I realized, no, this is it, this is where we end.

As a writer, you're often operating on instinct or allowing the thinking about "why this choice and not others" to go on at the back of your brain without being consciously aware of it.

This is your seventh novel. In what way have you changed as a writer over the course of your career?

I was twenty-one and in graduate school when I started to write my first novel. So I like to think my writing and I have done some growing up since. I suppose what's been most striking to me with Home Fire is that I want my writing to be much more pared down than it previously was. When I started off I liked more by way of stylistic flourishes; now I think writing conveys more through restraint. But I suppose the most obvious change is that you become more confident and ambitious as a writer, and I hope that shows through in the work.

August 16, 2017

When it ended last year the X-Files was one of the longest-running shows on network television with undeniably devoted fans. The show may be done, but FBI agents Scully and Mulder are cemented in our pop culture history and illustrator Kim Smith is bringing them to a new audience--kids. The X-Files Earth Children Are Weird is a bright, fun, picture book, and in it Smith shows young Scully and Mulder already engaged in their believer/skeptic dynamic during a backyard sleepover. While the characters try to sort out the evidence, readers will already be in the know, and the end has a funny twist that should produce a few chuckles. Below are a couple of pages from the book, and below that, a special illustration that Smith created exclusively for the Amazon Book Review. Here's what Smith has to say about the X-Files...

What I love most about the X-Files is the stories that have nothing to do with the main alien mystery/conspiracy. I always loved seeing what new paranormal mystery Mulder and Scully would explore, and what twists and turns the story would take. My favorite storyline in these types of episodes was the one called Bad Blood, where Mulder and Scully retell their versions of the same series of events. It gives great insight into how they view things differently, and also, it's hilarious.

Now this illustration you won't find anywhere in the book -- it's an exclusive image of Scully and Mulder enjoying one of our favorite pastimes...reading stacks of books.

August 08, 2017

Two sisters vanish, and when only one turns up to tell the harrowing tale, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Abby Winter doubts her story. Proving that the reign of the unreliable narrator is not yet over, Wendy Walker's Emma in the Night will have you guessing until the very last page. Senior Editor Seira Wilson calls it "a memorable and highly satisfying thriller."

Learn more about today's best books of the month releases below, or browse all of our favorites for August here.

Back in 2012, Jonathan Dee wrote, "Only bad literature proselytizes"¦Great literature sees, without advocacy and without pity." His new novel, The Locals, is indeed great, partly because it fulfills the requirements of that dictum. Dee doesn't proselytize, but does "see" very clearly the intersecting lives of the residents of Howland, a fictional town in the Berkshires. After 9/11, a wealthy New York financier moves in, and in short order becomes the town's First Selectman, eschewing a salary, repealing taxes, and behaving, in both popular and unpopular ways, like the prince of a blue-collar fiefdom. Dee, an extraordinary mimic, inhabits the quirky voice of one character, and then another. Those shifts of perspective give a polyphonic, democratic feel to this novel. Social isolation, real-estate speculation and the promise of love: it's America in a microcosm, but it's to Dee's credit that his readers are never entirely sure how he thinks any of us could do better. --Sarah Harrison Smith

For three decades beginning in 1986, John Saunders was a mainstay at ESPN, a jack-of-all-trades providing of thoughtful play-by-play, analysis, and commentary across a wide range of sports including basketball, football, and hockey, as well as anchoring the network's flagship program, SportsCenter. For many, Saunders would appear to be leading an ideal existence "“ a happy family combined with a career that also happened to align with his passions "“ but off-camera, he was harboring a secret: debilitating depression that threatened everything he held dear, including his life. In this autobiography (written with John U. Bacon), Saunders lays bare his struggles, and the story is as harrowing as it is inspirational, a journey through our darkest pathways where the only way out is through. Made all the more profound by his unexpected death in 2016, Playing Hurt is a testament to human will, generosity, and the triumph of optimism.

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The question of human existence and its aftermath seems binary: Alive or dead? Heaven or Hell? Consciousness or nothingness? But what if it isn't that simple? Author Marcus Sakey explores a radical idea of what comes next in his new thriller AFTERLIFE, selected by Amazon editors as one of the 10 best books of July.

With a sniper stalking Chicago, two FBI agents go on the hunt "“ and fall in love. But when their investigation expands to a world we can't see called the Echo, the case really gets complicated. We spoke with Sakey -- also the author of the wildly popular Brilliance series -- about life, death and everything that follows.

You say AFTERLIFE was "a beast" to write. Please explain. I've had pieces of this book in my head for almost 10 years. It was such a balancing act to try to get the right tone, to get the rules right, without making it creak under the weight of its mythology. To make it a love story -- it's really more than anything a love story -- while also trying to make it a modern myth. I rewrote the first 100 pages nine times.

Nooooo! Nine. Nine. Basically, it took me three books to write this one book.

Just to be fair to Brilliance fans, that series is truly over, right? At the moment, I have no intention to write a sequel to Brilliance. I will now immediately reverse myself and say that I do know what a next novel would be. I thought one up that I think is kind of neat. I'm not really planning to write it right now.

So it's totally going to happen. It is absolutely totally happening or not happening. It is positively one of those two things.

Let's get to AFTERLIFE. Who are Brody and Claire? Brody and Claire are FBI agents in a Chicago that's under siege by a mysterious terrorist sniper, someone who is killing completely at random and for whom the terror is kind of the point. It was strongly influenced by the Beltway snipers in D.C. [in 2002.] People didn't take their kids to school. They wouldn't go shopping for groceries. They wouldn't go to church. Gas stations were wrapped in these tarps. That sort of fascinated me. I thought it played really nicely into the larger questions that I wanted to explore.

How did you create Brody and Claire? Were they based on anyone in particular? Claire really was the one who came in focus first. I love strong women characters. It's a partnership where she's the one who's a step ahead. That was something that I wanted to do. I knew that it was going to be an intense love affair. I knew that Claire was his boss, and I really wanted that sense of the heat of a new thing, this intensity of them having just found each other. And this being the worst possible time to begin something that is already not, on the surface, a good idea.... So Claire really came into focus first. And once she did, I tried to write the guy that would be worthy of Claire.

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It's actually not much of a spoiler to say that Brody dies in the pursuit. That's on the back cover of the jacket. Book's called AFTERLIFE.

But it's where he goes that's fascinating"”a place called the Echo. One of the characters says "Don't try to lawyer the afterlife," as in, don't get caught up in all the rules of the Echo. But dude, there are a lot of rules! [Laughs.] That might explain why it took me nine tries to get there. Y'know, it was a hard balance. I wanted to create a visceral afterlife that, under certain circumstances, you might land in. And yet I wanted it to have a feeling of being grounded, rooted in some level of science, or at least some sort of logical philosophy, rather than mysticism or religion.

What's unique about this place? One of the central rules of the Echo is that it's a dead world. Fire doesn't burn, machines don't work, cars don't drive. But when people land there, we contain a measure of energy, and we can take it from each other. By taking that, we grow stronger, literally physically, but also in our powers and in our connection to life.

This is all taking place in Chicago, where you're from"”or at least Chicago's Echo. Obviously, you love your city, but it's often held up as a symbol of what's wrong with America. Do you think Chicago gets a bad rap? I think Chicago is a pretty good symbol for America period, in the good and bad. I think that there are some horrible things that happen in Chicago and that you can't not acknowledge that. It was interesting in writing this because a lot of the issues with the Chicago Police Department, Black Lives Matter and (the Spike Lee movie) Chi-raq were all happening at the same time. I didn't want to dwell too heavily in the grimness of that, but at the same time I felt like [there had to be] some reflection in the Echo. I tried to do that, to bring in some characters who had died violently and wrong and should have still been alive.

You're dealing with a lot of loss in the book. Was that something particularly personal for you? No, I wasn't reacting to a specific moment. The seed of this idea came out of a dream years ago. It was essentially a dream of something like the Echo. I was wandering around Chicago and everyone was gone. I wasn't scared, but I sort of realized, in that dream way that you know things, that I was dead. Then I woke up and my wife of 20 years is sleeping next to me. I just had this notion of like, 'Jesus, what if I were wandering the same place? What if I could come and visit the house, stand at the foot of the bed and not be able to touch her, interact with her, talk to her?' And then the dream became very scary indeed.

And now your literal dream is being turned into a movie by no less than Ron Howard. Obviously, under any circumstances, we couldn't be more happy to be with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer at Imagine [Entertainment]. But especially because they've got this huge experience in adapting weird, complicated books like A Beautiful Mind and the Dark Tower series. I am thrilled. I get to write the script. We're aiming at a high mark. I look at films like The Matrix and Inception as role models. I have no idea if I can get anywhere close, but those are the kinds of stars I'm navigating by.

OK, the question I ask everyone: What was the last thing you bought on Amazon? [Laughs.] It's so unexciting. I bought it this morning. It was a cleanser for my kitchen floor. I wish I had a really sexy answer!

Alynda Wheat is a senior writer for Amazon. She has previously written for People, Entertainment Weekly and Fortune.

July 17, 2017

With titles like Return of the Osprey, My Green Manifesto, and Sick of Nature, David Gessner's writing has, till now, pursued the trails of the likes of Muir and McPhee. His new book is about an altogether different passion: Ultimate Glory is the story of a young writer immersed in the world of competitive Frisbee in its nascent, stoner days, long before it grew into an organized sport played by tens of millions worldwide. We'll address that one soon, but in the meantime, here's a piece Gessner wrote for us in April 2015.

Among Western authors--those who write about the West, that is--it's arguable that none stand above Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey. At the very least, no two writers presented such antithetical personas: Stegner, the buttoned-down professor and family man dedicated to discourse and process, vs. Cactus Ed, Stegner's former pupil and irascible, impatient anarchist, who fought all development as despoilment.

But can you judge these books by their covers, or even by their books? Award-winning nature writer David Gessner wasn't sure, so he lit out to the land they called home (if not always), searching for the truth beyond their iconic images. The result will appeal to fans of both authors: All the Wild That Remains is an entertaining, illuminating travelogue, as well as a thoughtful examination of the complicated men and their legacies across modern landscapes.

Here Gessner contrasts the two giants of Western literature, starting at the top with with the most conspicuous, if superficial, difference: their chosen hairstyles. All the Wild That Remains was an April 2015 selection for Amazon.com's Best Books of the Month in Nonfiction.

Of Canyonlands and Coiffures: Abbey and Stegner's Contrasting (Hair)Styles

by David Gessner

There's more than one way to fight for the environment and more than one style. This was a point that kept being driven home during my travels through the American West for my new book, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West. It was driven even deeper during my three years of researching and writing the book, as I began to learn more about the lives and work of two of our country's greatest 20th century writer-environmentalists. I believe that Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey provide models for the rest of us, like human signposts, though at first the signs sometimes seem to be pointing in opposite directions.

One of the fun parts of writing the book was comparing and contrasting Stegner and Abbey. I didn't want to caricature them (except when drawing actual caricatures like the ones above) but there they were: the proper, virtuous, almost regal Stegner, on the one hand, married to the same woman for 59 years, and on the other the wild, self-proclaimed monkey-wrenching anarchist, Abbey, who had five children with five wives. It got to the point while writing the book that I felt I could write a whole chapter by simply contrasting the two men's hairstyles:

There were plenty of other fun methods of contrasting as well. One was their different attitudes toward the river trips they took. Abbey, near the end of a ten day paddling trip on the Colorado, wondered if he could just stop and live there forever, roaming the side canyons, wandering naked, shooting deer and drinking river water, seeing no one. Stegner on a similar trip, also fantasized about an extended stay in the canyon, but with one telling addition: he thought it would be a great place to roll up his sleeves and write a book.

Work, and its deep pleasures, was always a touchstone for Stegner. Meanwhile part of the appeal of Ed Abbey, I've come to believe, is that he understood the lost art of lounging. Here he is in Desert Solitaire: "I was sitting out back on my 33,000 acre terrace, shoeless and shirtless, scratching my toes in the sand and sipping on a tall iced drink, watching the flow of the evening over the desert."

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Virtue, outside of the virtue of saving wild places, doesn't have much of a role in Ed Abbey's work, and do-gooders are frowned upon. Meanwhile sensual pleasure, which plays such a large role in Abbey's life and writing, goes virtually unmentioned in Stegner's.

I began to think that we read Wallace Stegner for his virtues, but we read Edward Abbey for his flaws. Stegner the sheriff, Abbey the outlaw.

I remember an essay written by the editor and essayist Rust Hills about Michel de Montaigne and Henry David Thoreau. "Montaigne is somehow marvelously humanly indolent; Thoreau had an exceptional, almost inhuman, vitality," he wrote. "Thoreau kept in shape...." What does he mean by this? He means that Thoreau, though famous as someone who retired from the active world, worked vigorously on himself and his art, walked hard (four hours) each day, wrote in his journal, striving for a higher, better life. Montaigne in contrast, accepted his sloppy self. The song he sang was: "This is me. Take me as I am. I do."

Abbey, of course, plays the Montaigne role here, and while Stegner may at first seem miscast in the Thoreau role, this particular aspect of Thoreau fits well. With Stegner, there is always a sense of vigor, fitness, striving to be more.

This came through in the way they fought for the planet. While Stegner's political thinking was more sophisticated and restrained, Abbey's words had a rare attribute: they made people act. Monkeywrenching, or environmental sabotage, has recently been lumped together with terrorism, but Abbey could make it seem glorious. After finishing a chapter or two, readers would want to join his band of merry men, fighting the despoiling of the West by cutting down billboards and pulling up surveyors' stakes and pouring sugar into the gas tanks of bulldozers, all of this providing a rare example of true literary influence at work.

Abbey wrote from two sources: love and hate. He said as much, claiming that a writer should be, "Fueled in equal parts by anger and love." He had fallen in love with a place and he wrote paeans to those places while cursing those who were trying to despoil what he loved.

He wouldn't have used the word "despoil" of course. He would have chosen, as he often did, the more direct and blunt "rape." And why not? The enemy was aggressive, rapacious, never resting. In response he had to be the same. Words were his first line of defense, maybe his last, and he piled them up like a barricade of rubble. Though he could be brutally concise, he was also a hyperbolist, and like Thoreau, varied between these two extremes. Both an embracer of excess and a blunt blurter. Either way the words seem to have been summoned directly from and in defense of the land. His is not the effort of a stylist.

If Abbey didn't despise with such passion his would be just run of the mill curmudgeonly grumbling. In Abbey's world Lake Mead, Lake Powell's downstream cousin that was created by the Hoover Dam, is "a stagnant cesspool" and "a placid evaporation tank," while the cars that tourists drive in are "upholstered mechanized wheelchairs." He writes: "With bulldozer, earth mover, chainsaw and dynamite the international timber, mining, and beef industries are invading our public lands"”bashing their way into our forests, mountains and rangelands and looting them for everything they can get away with." "Mr. Abbey writes as a man who has taken a stand," was how Wendell Berry once put it.

This is both instinctive and the result of a thought-out philosophy. "It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives," is how Abbey begins "A Writer's Credo."

He continues:

"Am I saying that the writer should be--I hesitate before the horror of it--political? Yes sir, I am"¦..By 'political' I mean involvement, responsibility, commitment: the writer's duty to speak the truth--especially unpopular truth. Especially truth that offends the powerful, the rich, the well-established, the traditional, the mythic, the sentimental."

If Abbey was Mr. Outside, then Stegner was Mr. In.

Here is what Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said about Stegner's biography of John Wesley Powell:

When I first read Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, shortly after it was published in 1954, it was as though someone had thrown a rock through the window. Stegner showed us the limitations of aridity and the need for human institutions to respond in a cooperative way. He provided me in that moment with a way of thinking about the American West, the importance of finding true partnership between human beings and the land. (FN: 208 JB)

Even Ed Abbey, who may not have even liked Stegner that much, said of him: "Wallace Stegner is the only American writer who deserves the Nobel Prize."

That these words did not come from a student trying to butter up a teacher"”who could be more antithetical to wild Ed than the older, buttoned down, conservative, hippie-hater?"”make them carry even more weight. Abbey admired Stegner's work and his commitment to making art, but perhaps admired more his teacher's commitment to fighting for the land.

At the urging of his friend, the writer Bernard DeVoto, Stegner began to write a series of environmental articles in the early '50s, and those articles were read by David Brower, the charismatic single-minded executive director of the Sierra Club. Brower recruited Stegner to edit a book that would describe the wonders that would be lost if a dam were built within the borders of Dinosaur. In their successful campaign to stop the dam the two men would not just help win a battle but would revolutionize the way environmental fights were waged. Until the effort to save Dinosaur there had been something upper crust and musty about the Sierra Club and the other environmental organizations, but with Dinosaur they would go from fuddy-duddys to fighters. Over the next decade great gains would be made and a new style forged: full page ads would be taken out in major papers comparing the damming and drowning of the Grand Canyon to the flooding of the Sistine Chapel, beautifullyphotographedbooks would help change our national consciousness, park land would be purchased as it hadn't been since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, culminating with the Wilderness Act.

In 1960, Stegner published his soon-to-be-famous "Wilderness Letter," which argued that wilderness was vital to the American soul, and that undeveloped land was deeply valuable, even when that value was not obvious and monetary. One influential reader of the letter was the new Secretary of the Interior, Stuart Udall who thought so highly of it that he read it out loud at a Sierra Club gathering in April of 1961. By then he had also read Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, and he was determined to get Stegner to come to Washington with him. Stegner was reluctant; he was a writer with work to do, not a politician, but eventually he gave in. In D.C., he worked on the beginnings of legislation that would become 1964's ground-breaking Wilderness Bill and attended meetings with Udall, during which, according to the Secretary, Stegner was "never bashful." The eventual bill was in fact an almost perfect practical embodiment of the "Wilderness Letter," a massive setting aside of lands never to be developed. For Stegner it was a heady experience, and he got "an inside look at parts of the Kennedy administration during its first energetic year" as well as "a good lesson in how long ideas that on their face seemed to me self-evident and self-justifying could take to be translated into law." He also went on a vital reconnaissance mission to Utah for Udall, scouting the land that the Secretary would eventually save as Canyonlands National Park.

But the truth is Stegner only lasted four months in Washington. At heart he was not a politician but a writer and teacher. Mary Stegner found D.C. cold and lonely, and by the beginning of the spring term they were back at Stanford. His relationship with Udall would continue, however, and he would help the politician write the early drafts of what was to become Udall's best-selling conservation manifesto, The Silent Crisis. And for the rest of his life Stegner would keep fighting in the environmental wars despite the fact that these obligations "constantly prevented the kind of extended concentration a novel demands." It would have been nice to have turned his back on these extra obligations, but of course, being who he was, he couldn't.

For Stegner, who always valued results above mere theory, efficacy was a great virtue. Or maybe it is best to say that he valued real-world effectiveness along with theory, broad ideas applied to the practical earth.

Overworked as he was, Stegner's could sometimes be a grumpy goodness. In a fascinating exchange of letters with the beat poet and environmental guru, Gary Snyder, Stegner argues for the less exotic virtues of the cultivated western mind versus the enlightened eastern one. This included the importance of doing what one should and not what one felt like. In a letter dated January 27, 1968, he wrote: "I have spent a lot of days and weeks at the desks and in the meetings that ultimately save redwoods, and I have to say that I never saw on the firing line any of the mystical drop-outs or meditators."

He went to those meetings because it was the right thing to do. An obligation, yes, but one he valued.

"The highest thing I can think of doing is literary," he wrote a friend. "But literature does not exist in a vacuum, or even in partial vacuum. We are neither detached nor semi-detached, but linked to the world by a million interdependencies. To deny the interdependencies, while living on the comforts and services they make possible, is adolescent when it isn't downright dishonest."

Which meant sitting in at those boring meetings where he saw no mystical drop-outs or meditators. And giving talks, writing articles, and even propaganda when he would have rather been immersing himself deeply in a novel. He sometimes grumbled about this, of course he did. It was extra work, yet another thing-to-do in a life full of them. But he had signed on and he wouldn't ever really sign off. Like Major Powell, he knew the despoilers, the extractors, would never rest. You never really "won" an environmental battle, after all, just saved places that would be fought over again in the future. Since the boomers never rested he knew that meant he could do very little resting himself. Unlike many of us today, he did not take environmentalism for granted, since when he had begun to fight it barely existed. Stegner concludes his "A Capsule History of Conservation" this way:

"Environmentalism or conservation or preservation, or whatever it should be called, is not a fact, and never has been. It is a job."

So he did his job.

As did his former student, Ed Abbey, albeit in a very different way. Though he was a very different man than his old teacher, they had common ground. For Abbey and Stegner that ground was the earth itself, a place they both loved and were willing to fight for.